Those gold medals would normally be man’s race run. But Coe, now Lord Coe, baron of Ranmore, is striving for something that he believes would dwarf two, or even 20 gold medals. He boards a plane tomorrow bound for Singapore from where, leading the London 2012 bid, he hopes to bring home the Games. There are five cities in the contest. London appears to be on the shoulder of Paris, the front-runner, but closing towards the line. To get there, a city must achieve a simple majority on a sequence of secret ballots among the 115 International Olympic Committee (IOC) members eligible to vote on July 6. There are 10 days of hard lobbying and, at the end, one hour of final presentation. With billions of pounds or Euros, with exaggerated Anglo-French political importance injected into it, Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac are jetting across the world to joust for last-minute votes.
“The Olympics,” said Cherie Blair when foreign sports writers were invited to Downing Street, “would be Tony’s legacy.” Rather they would be the legacy of Coe’s spirit, his contacts in the Olympic rings, his undiminished, obsessive single-mindedness, and his indefatigable willingness to store up a thousand training miles for a moment’s triumph. “If we bring home the Games for 2012,” he says, “it would be the greatest thing I’ve been involved in. A lot of people have put our lives on hold for the past year to try to make it happen because it will transform the values of sport in the UK.”
It is Wednesday morning on a sweltering London day. Coe had risen at 6am, was at No.10 two hours later to brief the prime minister on last weekend’s presentation of the bid to African Olympic representatives in Ghana, and after a quick pit stop at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, we are driving to Brighton.
Coe’s father Peter, the engineer who coached Seb to his running peaks as scientifically as a trainer handling a champion racehorse, is in hospital. “He has pneumonia,” says Coe, “and at 85, that’s a concern.”
The memory goes back to the days and nights when the Coes, Londoners both but settled close to the Peak District south of Sheffield, would spend endless days and nights pushing the boundaries of world-running feats. Sebastian would stride out and his father would drive him, pushing body and soul remorselessly over a 15-year career span. The road miles made Coe the dominant middle-distance racer of his time.
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Something he had said at the height of his accomplishments struck me as we made this journey to his ailing father. “Going into a race thinking you want to destroy anything is a little counter-productive,” he said. “There has to be a detached concentration. The key is bottling up the mental energy, releasing it economically in a way that releases the physical energy.”
The Olympian ideal, sound mind in a healthy body.
But now, speeding down to the south coast, stealing a few hours between giving the Prime Minister feedback on the effect debt relief is having on the Olympic bid and catching another plane to lobby for votes in Cologne, Coe is a concerned son. He lost his mother, Angela, in March and has not yet been able to properly grieve her death, from the harrowing Progressive Supranuclear Palsy disease that attacks the motor neurons. “A few hours after we buried mum,” he reflects, “I was on a flight to Brisbane to present the bid to the Olympic commitees of Oceania. It had been Angela Coe, an actress who maintained the family unity, kept life as normal as possible for Seb, his two sisters and a brother during those years consumed by long training and short athletic fulfilment. Her illness, devastating to see, reminds the father and son of the year approaching the Los Angeles Games when Seb contracted a mysterious disease that sapped his energy and threatened his dream.
They feared it might be a reaction of an immune system suppressed by pushing the body so remorselessly that at times he could barely grip the steering wheel on his car at the end of training. Doctors concluded his illness was toxoplasmosis, a disease that affects the glands and was probably transmitted by a cat while he trained in Italy.
“From July 1983 to the February before the Games,” Coe recalls, “I just didn’t run. My dad did a lot of pretty special coaching things, but the greatest test of his credibility was to get me back not simply to defend the Olympic title, but in shape to run seven races in nine days.
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“He never flinched. His background wasn’t in running, but competitive cycling. He told me, ‘This is your Tour de France. Don’t expect to be in shape on the first day or to be bombing down the Champs Elysees on the last day with the yellow jersey. It won’t work like that’.”
Coe recounts the story unaware of the irony that plotting to bring home the prize to the Champs Elysees is precisely what his days and nights now are dedicated to trying to prevent. He smiles, momentarily, when I point this out.
“You know, I was in Paris just yesterday (Tuesday),” he says. “I was on the Eurostar and a very, very nice French girl smiled at me. ‘Enjoy your trip to Paris,’ she said, ‘it’s a very beautiful city’.”
“It is a beautiful city,” Coe replied, “and I’m working very hard so that I don’t have to return here in 2012!” They parted laughing. “I think the French were wondering what I was doing over there, as if I was on some sort of espionage,” he muses. “I hope they thought that, in fact I was there to address French-speaking African journalists.”
Ghana on Sunday, a stolen half-day with the four children from his broken marriage at a school sports day on Monday, Paris on Tuesday, Whitehall to Brighton to Cologne on Wednesday . . . and via Gatwick to southern Spain from Thursday until today where he presses the London bid during the Mediterranean Games in Almeria. Coe, and his chief executive Keith Mills, encircle the globe as twin spearheads of the bid. A former Tory MP, Coe has the standing of Olympic prowess that is like an embrace to the family of the IOC, 34 of whose members also won Olympic medals, some 60 of whom are actively involved either in the sports or in the IAAF, the international athletics federation on whose council Coe sits.
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Coe, the Olympic insider, and Mills, the East Ender whose business brain invented the Air Miles concept, work the circles as a pair. The former runner and politician makes the introductions, the entrepreneur promotes the concept of a revamped London bid that 16 months ago seemed condemned by an IOC report that, for example, described London’s transport system as “obsolete”.
Not many would argue with that. But Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, used that withering report to press the government for funds to repair this blight on the capital’s reputation.
Livingstone and the Olympian make an odd couple. “Red Ken” is as far left as it gets in British politics, Coe is a true blue, from his support of Chelsea to his place in the Lords as a Tory life peer. Yet, though an Olympic bid is to many an appalling excuse to make the Government face up to 60 years of starvation of money for the neglected East End of the Thames, the bid is in effect the chance of a lifetime to regenerate that area. The bid is built around regeneration that, with roads, rail and essential rebuilding already in the pipeline, will cost £11 billion. The root choice for the IOC is to build future sporting venues, vote for London’s pledges, or to reward Paris for having already spent the money investing in two previous bids for the Games and upgrading its candidature this time.
Paris a year ago seemed beyond reach. London has since reinvented its bid and forged a relationship between government and sport that did not exist. The stinging rebuke from the Olympic godfathers was the stimulus to that.
Coe’s arrival as chairman, his almost scary perseverance, are instrumental in the process. He took up the baton in May last year when Barbara Cassani, the American businesswoman who put together the concept and the bid team resigned. Cassani had despaired of eking the necessary billions out of the Treasury, and she was not enamoured by the prospect of begging for the votes of privileged IOC members she had never met.
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But how daunting was the challenge to Coe? “It is quite a responsibility,” he says. “My friends say that my relative equanimity and the fact that I don’t get flustered or excited is down to my Indian parentage.”
His maternal grandfather was from Delhi, and on his paternal grandfather’s side there was the English running gene. Yet it was outside the family where Coe turned when he was asked to take the leadership. “The only person I spoke to was a very, very close friend. He’s a laconic East Ender whose always been a wise counsel for me. I rang him and asked: ‘What do you reckon?’ ” “You’ve got to do it,” he replied, “there’s no decision.” The Londoner, who Coe won’t name, but a self-achiever who left school at 14 and became head of PE at one of the big London colleges, added: “Mind you, Seb, you’ll either be carrying the flame or the can!” His priority was to try to make sure they could cut through the red tape of Whitehall to meet the Olympic requirements. “My friend is old, old, old Labour,” says Coe, “back to the ideas of Keir Hardie” but outside of my old man, I value his advice.
Pretty soon, Livingstone and Coe had their heads together. “Ken said he had his researchers pouring through Hansard to check whether he’d said anything brutal about me in Westminster!” recalls Coe. “I knew I’d said nothing about him because I was more than careful not to be confrontational in my short political time.”
His task was the more urgent because, Coe said, “I needed assurances that, within three months of the appointment, I could go to Athens where the whole Olympic family would be under one roof and present a credible bid answering all the criticisms. Ken was brilliant. He cut through the processes at getting decisions without having to wait for 27 meetings of civil servants that would have cut us off at the start.”
The Tory, the Labour mayor, the Foreign Office, eventually the full Cabinet, got behind the bid in a way that, Coe now believes, has raised sport up the political and social agenda far higher than in his 47 years of life.
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“We’re not going to Singapore to lose,” he insists, “but if we do, there is a much clearer template now for a major championships and for securing sport in this country than existed before.”
That, and an end to the laughing stock that British sport became after the discredited World Cup football and the bungled world athletics championship bids, is urging Coe and company to run the extra mile.
Nobody knows whether London or Paris will win the prize. But shortly after noon, English time, on July 6, Seb Coe will know whether he is coming home carrying the flame, or the can.